New Zealand - Christchurch braces for worst post-quake winter yet. Christchurch health and social agencies say they are bracing themselves for the worst post-quake winter yet, as the effects of influenza, bitter weather, stress and "shameful" living conditions compound.
Clamour for survival kits - Panicked Aucklanders have been snapping up emergency kits in the wake of last Sunday's earthquakes. Some suppliers of survival packs have reported a 300 per cent increase in sales from the Auckland region this week.

Louisiana sinkhole update - ‘Very long period’ tremors increasing at giant Louisiana sinkhole – Indicates gas and ‘liquid’ moving underground.
All work has been ceased at the Bayou Corne sinkhole after monitoring systems detected tremors Friday morning. The Office of Conservation and the Assumption Parish Incident Command detected elevated subsurface activity in the area around a massive 13-acre sinkhole. Seismic monitoring also detected water movement in the slurry as well as increased bubbling on the western side of the sinkhole. Experts say a brine cavern drilled into the underground Napoleonville salt dome may have caused the sinkhole after it collapsed. 350 residents in a nearby town have been evacuated as a result of the slurry area.
Texas Brine mines caverns into the dome to harvest salt and the resulting brine mixture is then piped to nearby petrochemical companies. Jindal has also laid out a contingency plan for a second Texas Brine cavern, known as Oxy-Geismar 1, which experts say may have been drilled too close to the edge of the salt dome. Jindal said there is no data indicating a second cavern collapse is imminent. "The seismic activity is limited to the Oxy 3/sinkhole area, showing no indication of impact to the Oxy 1 area. Monitoring is constantly ongoing in the area and Conservation will advice the public of significant changes in subsurface conditions."

Australia - Man critically hurt by storm-felled tree. A runner who was injured after a super cell storm hit southeast Queensland remains in a critical condition and about 1500 properties are still blacked out.

EXTREME HEAT & DROUGHT / WILDFIRES / CLIMATE CHANGE -

The UK government's chief scientist has said that there is already enough CO2 in the atmosphere for there to be more floods and droughts over the next 25 years. He said there was a "need for urgency" in tackling climate change. He said that the later governments left it, the harder it would be to combat.
He made his comments in the final week of his tenure as the government's chief scientific adviser. "The [current] variation we are seeing in temperature or rainfall is double the rate of the average. That suggests that we are going to have more droughts, we are going to have more floods, we are going to have more sea surges and we are going to have more storms. These are the sort of changes that are going to affect us in quite a short timescale," he warned.
His comments come at a time when "climate sceptics" have been challenging claims by scientists that the release of CO2 into the atmosphere is increasing global temperatures. Other critics have argued that even if the burning of fossil fuels is changing the planet's climate, the reduction of CO2 levels by the world's emerging nations is unrealistic, impractical and undesirable.
His blunt response is: "The evidence that climate change is happening is completely unequivocal." But the issue, he says has been clouded by the fact that the planet's climate system operates slowly to changes and so there are long delays in CO2 level rises in the atmosphere resulting in changes to weather patterns. "So the next 20 or 30 years are going to be determined by what's up there now." Governments have agreed to try to keep the rise in average global temperatures to below 2C. Given the slow progress in attempts to curb CO2 emissions at successive climate change talks, many experts believe that target to be unrealistic.

About Me

Hello and welcome!
I'm Crystal - the sole creator and maintainer of this site.
I started the webpage in 1998 - just before the turn of the millenium, when everyone was talking about the disasters that were coming.